Contents of a programmer’s backpack

Returning to the room tonight I was greeted by an amazing spread of technology across the bed in my hotel room. Early in the day I had returned to my room only to realize that my cell phone was not in my pocket as expected, so I had proceeded to pull everything out of my backpack, one item at a time, and place it on the bed. Turns out it wasn’t in there, it was back in the Cabana… but that isn’t really the point of this post. Now, because it is very late and I wish to use my bed, I’m forced to take all of these items and carefully move them to another location or put them back into my bag. Looking over the pile of items, I’m stunned by the amount of gadgetry I’ve brought with me… and it reminded me a lot of that scene from the first Austin Power movie where he was being given back his personal possessions after being awoken from hibernation.

Yep, that really is all my stuff… I had just never taken out more than one item at a time before, so it had seemed quite normal before now. The pile contained:

a digital camera,

a digital video camera,

a laptop of course,

a power cord for said laptop,

studio headphones (yep, the big kind),

a USB web cam,

a full-size mouse,

a RIO Nitrus music player,

small headphones for the Rio,

a USB memory stick reader (for the memory sticks out of the digital camera) and

a second hard drive for my laptop…

wow. And to think, I’ve been carrying all of that around on my back during the day… I suspect this isn’t an unusual amount of stuff, especially for those of us in ‘the business’ (saying ‘in the business’ makes it seem so much cooler than saying ‘geeks’), but it was more than I realized I had with me. I have a few other pieces with me as well (a 4 port hub, cell-phone, assorted power supplies) but that pile of technology was all from my backpack…